Shadowlands Benched for TBC

Community General Discussion
242

I wonder if you ever scrolled through those credits and wondered why you never once see any mention of the actual software programmer/developers in those credits.

You do realize that they don’t list the software developers/programmers in the credits because of severe poaching in the software industry?

YOU THINK 10 DEVELOPER “ENGINEERS” WROTE ALL THE CODE FOR SHADOWLANDS?

You do realize that it’s the developers/programmers who do the manual, material work right?

Designers outside of artists and level world designers (who use an in house tool grafted BY THE DEVELOPERS) to literally drag and drop objects into the game…

Remember WC3 LEVEL EDITOR? That is LITERALLY what the Game Designers used to design the game. Developers are the ones who have to go in and actually code everything to not just float there inanimately…

Basically every single game that allows modding?

That is ONLY POSSIBLE because it had an in game API with a graphical user interface made by the developers for the designers to “design” the game.

Think of “interior designers”. Do they build the walls, paint the walls, cut the trees and make thr wood into 2x4’s, lay tile, run electrical and lighting, air conditioning, build all that furniture themselves, then carry it all in themselves and set it up?

NO. They draw it all up on paper and computers and say to all the engineers and “developers” of their respective trade that they want all this stuff done.

It’s up to designers to dream it up. Developers make it a reality.

Are you still gonna argue bro?

Reminds me of the Black Knight. Tis but a flesh wound!

243

What do you think Engineers are?

244

Software Engineers are not developers … I am a software engineer/systems engineer.

I write scripts, debug servers, transpose application logs for errors…

The developers are not engineers…

Man.

245

Ok. Using that logic from your own job – since Classic WoW is a game that does not need any sort of content development.

How is it hard to think that Classic WoW is a small team of just engineers who are maintaining the game? Again, its a game that requires no new systems, art, story, gameplay, environmental, or musical development at all. All it needs is to be run.

Like have you noticed that nothing related to Classic is located under a “Designer” title? Its just Engineers.

246

They already did a whole interview on the massive things they had to do to make classic a reality since they did it within the updated engine and not the old engine version. Integrated with the battle net launcher.

Also. They thought classic was going to flop.

It didnt. It pulled more numbers than BFA and Shadowlands did. It saved them and is why Bobby still got his bonus…

BFA had massive content droughts. Classic got massive updates and support. So many issues with layering and all that. They never expected the massive participation and interest. Not even close.

They learned. They even hired the “inventor” of “classic servers” from Everquest, Holly Longdale, to head up TBC.

Shadowlands failed. Everyone is talking about how dead Mythic and Raid is, guilds devastated and empty. Unlike anything from previous expansions even…

How hard is it for you to think that knowing 10x more people are nostalgic about TBC than they ever were about classic… amidst a struggling expansion release with too much work to make it redeemable… that they wouldn’t hurry up and push a SURE THING rather than take a gamble with something everybody hates.

Unbelievable.

247

None of this means the Classic team is large though. Its all rambling. Even if that is so (SL being a failure) – Classic and SL have the same profit margin since the subscription is still the same profit margin.

I get it man, SL in its current state isnt great. But that doesnt mean that for some reason that a team heavily dominated on content development ends is going to switch to Classic TBC – a game with all its content completed.

If this was the case, you’d see even more layoffs or swapping around of Teams than previously.

248

No they don’t! A massive subscription increase 7 months after the release of a failed expansion is NOT the same “profit margin”. I don’t think profit margin means what you think it means. But that’s another discussion altogether.

There is a reason all of the celebrity WoW streamers seem to be going dark on WoW all the sudden. You think a good chunk of them don’t have friends on the inside that they probably even play with daily that tell them the bs going on at Blizzard?

They can’t just out them by name but there is a good reason why leaks happen so often and are often so accurate.

It’s not ninja spies sneaking in and stealing classified folders frim safes guarded by laser beams if that’s what you thought.

249

The subscription works for both Classic and Retail. Its not two seperate subs – its the same margin.

250

Blizzard’s alternating playbook for capitalistic success:

-Hype Retail to keep people paying subscriptions
-When Retail interest wanes and subscriptions decrease, hype Classic
-When Classic’s popularity and subscriptions decrease, circle back to Retail with a new patch (and eventually a garbage expansion)

We keep paying our monthly fees. We, the consumers, are to blame for allowing a subpar game to continue with its financial success.

251

No. That’s NOT HOW ACCOUNTING WORKS EITHER!!!

Ohhhhh maaaaaaaaaaan. You have never worked in any sort of professional career, and it shows.

Alright. Since I’m educating today. Here we go.

A profit margin, is the amount of money you have in your pocket, after you pay out what it cost to sell the product, support it, ship it, pay employees, 401k, insurance, toilet paper in the bathroom, electricity bills, computers and enterprise licensing for all the software they use etc. It’s all factored in to the absolute final cost of a unit.

Once a sale is made, the money that remains after that, is the profit margin.

If it costs 10 dollars to make something, and you sold it for 60, you have a profit margin of 50 dollars.

So if Classic wow cost 1m to make, and they made 15m off it, then they had a profit margin of 14m. Shadowlands and Classic don’t share a profit margin. Classic cost MUCH LESS TO SELL than Shadowlands because they already did a lot of the work already.

The profit margin of Classic is MUCH HIGHER than Shadowlands.

Watch Shark Tank on TV. What do you think Mr. Wonderful would say to someone asking for investment money if they said they planned on focusing on the product with the lowest profit margin… HE WOULD RIP THEM TO SHREDS. And everyone would be “out”.

It makes ZERO SENSE to focus on a product with low profit margins and terrible customer feedback…

All you are doing is further proving my point bro.

Okay. NOW. Because of FEDERAL TAX LAWS. A company LEGALLY CAN NOT ROLL TWO PRODUCTS INTO ONE CATEGORY for tax reporting purposes as well as FRAUD TRACKING REQUIREMENTS TO PREVENT MONEY LAUNDERING AND TAX FRAUD.

It’s called a General Ledger. Balancing the books. It’s all a thing man.

When they report subscriptions and store mounts and expansions and token purchases for reporting sales tax, they have to BREAK IT DOWN LINE BY LINE.

A business can’t just file a “standard deduction” on their tax returns like someone who works at McDonalds part time.

They owe the IRS TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN SALES TAX!!! From all our purchases! They have to be able to SHOW how they calculated the sales tax and be able to break it all the way down to an itemized receipt item by item…

252

I despise that man for what Sony turned him into; But I also give him credit because he reigned in Brad’s worst inclinations at EQ when Verant was still a thing. Back in the day the two of them were the OG Grandfathers of MMORPGs. They had such a vision for MMORPGs that literally WoW is still using that formula on group/raiding.

Smedley isn’t the devil he’s been made out to be, though. He was just put into a position of power by a major video game studio and when it came down to it he made decisions that were based on the bottom line of the company. But he still knew exactly where MMORPGs needed to go. He openly admonished at EQ’s convention (back when EQ Next was still a thing) where MMORPGs were at currently.

He went on to even say basically the way the genre has to go in order for it’s survival is that the players along with AI NPCs have to be the content creators and they create the world you play in. If the top guilds invade/raid one place the surrounding NPCs should change the landscape to reflect that. Then you would have players make content (like houses and things professions could make) that would be implemented into the game.

He said that this was the only way the genre was going to last because you had other games like MOBAs, FPS, and Survival games that would continue to whittle away at MMORPGs because they offer players instant-access to content, allows them to just hop in a game and progress without having to worry about other’s time constraints, and you could make your own world and have the world around you react to it.

What kills me here is that these old school MMORPG people know where the genre needs to go but the issue is that there’s a real lack of $$$ needed to make that game a reality. So instead what you do is you take a player like Ion who was spawned out of this original formula of instanced content=content and now you just keep going down the rabbit hole of competitive endgame content over the idea of MMORPGs being a living breathing world for players to exist in together.

253

Its a blanket subscription. The subscription doesnt vary based upon which version of WoW you play – only on the margin of time you subscribe for.

But since your argument is “Retail subs and Classic subs are two different margins” when the overall subscription is time for both – you dont have an actual argument here.

Typing long posts doesnt make you look smart. You would have to prove that Blizzard takes “account activity” into play rather than just general sub numbers. Which if you are trying to say – would make their whole accounting system completely convuluted since they would have to take “account activity” down to a unit to track how much of the sub money is going to each game.

254

Projection. So my post was too complicated for you to understand.

Gotcha.

Shadowlands cost is factored into the price of the EXPANSION. Remember? You can’t just subscribe to classic and Play shadowlands. You have to buy the EXPANSION first to offset the cost.

Content updates are factored into the price of the subscription.

So there you go. You just proved my entire argument. Shadowlands was already developed and paid for by the expansion sales.

Now the subscription is for content updates.

All resources are going towards the next content update, TBC CLASSIC, to drive up more SUBSCRIPTIONS, since they already have made all of the money they could make from Shadowlands via subscriptions and expansion sales.

Bye Felicia.

255

PoP onward IIRC was when most of the Verant creative team left the EQ dev team to go work elsewhere. Brad went to go make Vanguard (which would’ve been revolutionary had SoE funded it), most of Brad’s team iirc went to go work over at WoW for TBC and WoTLK (then they left). John was now the acting creative head and eventually CEO of SOE. So he became what he originally hated.

Brad iirc talked about what happened with Luclin and everything that followed which was that they needed to create a game to keep players logging in and the only metric they had to track that was /played per session and the players that high levels of metrics were all max level. Then WoW had begun going down the road to develop end-game only content so EQ basically matched them; not to mention Smedley was ordered to move all of the remaining creative team to EQ2.

256

No, your argument was stupid and made no sense. Its one subscription all together – you would have a point if there was two different subs for either Retail or Classic.

257

I’m pretty sure they have a different team working on each project. Benching Shadowlands to “improve” TBC classic isn’t even feasible.

258

Actually, back in 2018 BlizzCon – they said it was a smaller team within Team 2 that works on Classic. Its in house but a side project. A smaller dedicated team who focuses on Classic.

1 Like
259

So in essence it would make no profitable sense to bench a full time project to work on a side project.

260

Think of it like this: you have a team made up of mostly content devs. Why would you have that same team focus on a completed game from 15+ years ago without any need to develop any new content?

If this was ever the case – Team 2 would massively shrink.

1 Like
261

Remember when they said classic was going to flop.

But it was more popular than the expansion. Especially for subscriptions. Plus it was way cheaper than having to actually make an expansion.

And it BLEW there minds.

And they had a record sales year. In THE SECOND YEAR OF BFA BEING OUT… A RECORD YEAR. IN BFA. BFA??? RECORD YEAR!!! TWO YEARS AFTER IT CAME OUT ALL THE SUDDEN?

Toooootally not because of Classic lmao.

And then remember Shadowlands. How everyone hated it. And sropped playing. And guilds just fell apart. And mythic lfg went from 100 new listings every 10 seconds to 1 new listing every minute?

And then they… just said you know what… we COULD make all this money.

gives Bobby 200m dollars
hires Holly Longdale who was the Executive Producer of the company that owns the entire EVERQUEST FRANCHISE, that invented the genre that WoW exist within, and ALSO invented the concept of “classic” servers to head up TBC
starts putting microtransactions in classic
new mount in TBC took 1/100th the time to be ready as the Wandering Ancient mount promised over a year ago

But nahhhhhhh.

Let’s put out a fake TBC beta and then we will fake not put 9.1 on the PTR . But really 9.1 IS on the PTR right now… we just don’t know it yet.

Nahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Too conspiracy theory. Blizzard woud never do something that to me.

WOD, CATACLYSM, LEGION, SHADOWLANDS, CONTENT DROUGHTS AND TIME GATING MECHANICS

NEVER!